These "Wishing Balls" by Manoël Pénicaud are part of one of a fun set of exhibitions called "
Shared Sacred Sites." They're in the contemporary part (on display at the CUNY Graduate Center), and gather threads from Büyükada, an island off the coast of Turkey where pilgrims - mostly Muslim - come to pray at the Greek Orthodox church of St. George. Thousands unroll spools of thread as they ascend, an unbroken thread enhancing one's prayers' chance of coming true. (Pénicaud rescued these threads from being burnt the day after the saint's feast, along, presumably, with the detritus of models of houses and other prayer objects made of twigs and sugar cubes.) St. George for them may be an appearance of the immortal guide Khidr.
The exhibition introduces several sites around the Mediterranean where members of more than one Abrahamic faith come together - places of which I was unaware. I often tell students that ideas of exclusivist religion wouldn't have arisen in South or East Asia, where devotional practices and holy sites overlap, but I'll have to be more careful about generalizing. In the partner exhibit at the New York Public Library, with manuscripts, books and images of these sites, it's harder to detect this shared reality: it becomes some one tradition's narrative, at the expense of others'. But the videos and images at CUNY show places where the larger narratives are eclipsed by local practice and individual need: lived religion!
These "Wishing Balls" by Manoël Pénicaud are part of one of a fun set of exhibitions called "Shared Sacred Sites." They're in the contemporary part (on display at the CUNY Graduate Center), and gather threads from Büyükada, an island off the coast of Turkey where pilgrims - mostly Muslim - come to pray at the Greek Orthodox church of St. George. Thousands unroll spools of thread as they ascend, an unbroken thread enhancing one's prayers' chance of coming true. (Pénicaud rescued these threads from being burnt the day after the saint's feast, along, presumably, with the detritus of models of houses and other prayer objects made of twigs and sugar cubes.) St. George for them may be an appearance of the immortal guide Khidr. 
The exhibition introduces several sites around the Mediterranean where members of more than one Abrahamic faith come together - places of which I was unaware. I often tell students that ideas of exclusivist religion wouldn't have arisen in South or East Asia, where devotional practices and holy sites overlap, but I'll have to be more careful about generalizing. In the partner exhibit at the New York Public Library, with manuscripts, books and images of these sites, it's harder to detect this shared reality: it becomes some one tradition's narrative, at the expense of others'. But the videos and images at CUNY show places where the larger narratives are eclipsed by local practice and individual need: lived religion!